7-9 July 2016, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Co-Organized with the Pasold Research Fund, UK

The clothes on our backs are intimately connected with bodily experiences, cultural, social and gender portrayals, as well as the economies of fashioning and re-fashioning across place and time. Garments reflect the priorities of local and international economies, collective and personal inclinations, religious norms and conversions. These materialities are shaped by global flows of cloth and beads, furs, ready-made and second-hand apparel, in dynamic processes of fashion exchange.…

Since its formation in 1994, the Material Culture Caucus of the American Studies Association (ASA) has bridged the gap between university-based and museum-based scholars to promote the study of material culture in American Studies programs. To celebrate its twentieth birthday, the Caucus sponsored a workshop on Friday November 7, 2014, during the ASA national meeting in Los Angeles.

In the spirit of fun embedded in the conference theme, Debby Andrews, Sarah Anne Carter, Estella Chung, Ellen Gruber Garvey, and Catherine Whalen challenged workshop participants to play a variant of the classic game, “Twenty Questions.” Videographer Mark Escribano documented the event. To see how the workshop played out, and how such questions can inspire object-based exercises in the classroom or the museum, follow these links:

The Material Culture Caucus (MCC) of the American Studies Association (ASA) wishes to encourage participation in the 2015 Annual Meeting: “The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance,” October 8-11, 2015, Toronto, Canada. To read the conference Call for Papers please visit the ASA website.

Areas of interest related to the theme include, but are not limited to, the material culture of:

• War and other forms of violence

• Empire and colonialism

• Slavery

• Crisis and trauma

• Diaspora and immigration

• Prisons

• Poverty

• ‘Basic needs’: food (and water), clothing, and shelter

• Alienated/unalienated labor

• Inequitable/‘fair’ trade

• Racism

• Patriarchy/feminism

• Heteronormativity/queerness

• Ruins and preservation

• NAGPRA, repatriation, and cultural patrimony

• Climate change/sustainability

• Religion and spirituality

• Failure in business, technology, architecture and design, or relationships

UCL, University of London, 26-27 June 2015

Call for Stream Proposals

We’re pleased to announce that LCCT 2015 will be hosted by the UCL department of Anthropology and supported by the UCL Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies, the UCL department of Geography and the London Contemporary Dance School.

The call for streams is now open for the 4th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT). The conference is a space for those who share theoretical approaches and interests, but who frequently find themselves at the margins of their department or discipline. LCCT is an inter-institutional, non-hierarchical, and accessible event which makes a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and foster new avenues for critically orientated scholarship and collaboration.

We launched our Occasional Paper Series (ISSN 2158-5660) in 2010 with the intention that it would provide a novel, peer-reviewed, forum in which to publish research that would be hard to publish in the conventional home of an academic journal, but that was more extensive or rigorous than a blog entry. Since then, we’ve published a white paper on cultural protocols, a multimedia guide to plastic pollution and citizen activism, a paper (written by an undergraduate) about the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on Waveland, LA, and an extensive book of experimentation inside UCL’s Ethnographic Collections.

We are actively seeking further submissions to continue harnessing the power of the web to publish alternative and interesting things. Submissions can include:

Alternative writing formats

Photo essays

Sound and Video

Comics, Manga, Animations

And so on…

All submissions are peerreviewed by our chief editors or editors at large and will be indexed by the library of congress.…

Over the past half-century, chemistry has innervated the contemporary sensorum and the parameters of what tastes, looks, smells, or feels ‘right’. From ketchup to carpets, pesticides to plywood, permanent press clothing to colas and cosmetics, chemicals inform the aesthetics of modernity. While much of the work on the synthetic constituents of the everyday revolves around health and risk issues, this panel considers desires, pleasures, and values that undergird common interactions with the chemical world. To apprehend the pallet of the contemporary one must understand chemical perceptivity as composed of cultural signals and imitations of essence.

CALL FOR PAPERS:Deadline for Submissions: 7 December 2012

We invite papers from curators, conservators, artists, makers, anthropologists, art and design historians, digital media practitioners, researchers and others that explore the impact of technology upon the development and interpretation of museum ethnography, historically and today.

It is increasingly common for contemporary artists to explore anthropological and ethnographic concerns in their practice. At the same time, artists themselves have become a subject for study for contemporary anthropologists. In this symposium, researchers working in and between both fields will come together to explore links, friction and potential in a celebration of cross-disciplinary exchange.

The tracing of connections between anthropological and artistic practice, the extent to which the two disciplines are distinct, and their shared grounding in discourses of alteriety have been significant concerns for theorists and practitioners alike for many years now. Though given definite shape through Marcus and Myers’ The Traffic in Culture (1995), such discussions have now progressed far beyond beyond the “ethnographic turn” of Foster (1995) or anthropology’s own “crisis of representation”.…

For those staying in Lisbon, taking part of ECSAS 12 or having Summer vacations in Portugal, we would like to invite you to the Screening Series ‘From the Inside Looking Out – Filmic Visions of South Asia’s Tacit Other’ that will be hosted by the ECSAS2012 Conference, Lisbon, ISCTE/IUL, 26th of July 2012.
Please notice that the series is open and free of cost. For full details, posters, synopsis follow this link:

Some time ago I put out a call for papers for our Occasional Paper Series. Indexed by the Library of Congress, this is our attempt to explore the possibilities of thinking about how Material World could also be thought of as an open source, online publication. Since that last call, we’ve migrated the blog to a better platform, and I think we are now in a much better position to explore the possibilities of online publishing.

We are therefore always interested in contributions to the OPS which push the boundaries of our blog-like format. Obviously the broad theme is an engagement with material and visual culture and the development of a thoughtful perspective on the issues this engagement raises. Are you working through the medium of sound, film, or photography?…